


not alone

by Anzieizna



Category: Ghosts (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Found Family, Gen, Ghosts, Loneliness, Other, Robin centric, also as a side note why is pat's tag what it is and not just Pat Butcher his full name, cap is gay, living as a ghost, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anzieizna/pseuds/Anzieizna
Summary: He discovers he is trapped not too long after. The land he’s forced to dwell in is large, objectively, but after years and years being trapped in one place it feels like the smallest thing ever. His tribe leaves and another takes their place, and he mourns the familiarity of their voices and their laughs. He grows attached to the new tribe – watching children being born, growing, coupling and dying does that to you – but they move on, too.Everyone moves on.A few hundred years later, the first person stays.---OR:---Robin has been here the longest, and he knows loneliness better than anyone else.
Relationships: Fanny Button & Captain & Humphrey's Body & Humphrey's Head & Julian & Kitty & Mary & Pat & Thomas, Kitty & Robin (Ghosts TV 2019), Mary & Robin (Ghosts TV 2019), Pat & Robin (Ghosts TV 2019), Robin & Julian Fawcett, Robin & Lady Fanny Button, Robin & Thomas Thorne
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52





	not alone

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Witness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18706444) by [TheArchaeologist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheArchaeologist/pseuds/TheArchaeologist). 



> I just wanted y'all to know that I have a history test to study for tomorrow, and instead I was inspired by TheArchaeologists' amazing fic (which made me have Way Too Many feelings about Robin) and created this instead...
> 
> In other words, enjoy this piece of trash! And don't hesitate to point out any mistakes!

When Robin dies, he’s alone.

He’s not called Robin then, of course – that name won’t come to him for thousands of years, and his tribe never needed names when they knew each other’s grunts like it was their own heartbeat.

His father dies in battle with a wolf and his mother defending their tribe from another. After their heroic sacrifices, he feels rather robbed by the fever that took his life – he had been strong and brave once, just like his parents, but old age had taken his strength away and all that was needed to kill him was a strong cold.

He doesn’t mind it, though. He gets to see his family and tribe before he dies. His leader, looking down at him mournfully; his sister, clutching his hand with loud sobs; his wife, her head pillow next to his; his children, looking confused and disappointed.

When he comes to again, he is in the same place. His family is crying but they do not see him – they do not see him waving his arms, or hear his talking, or feel his touch. It’s almost like he’s not even _there_ , and he suddenly remembers the stories his grandmother would tell him of spirits and ghosts.

Being a ghost is… strange. He did not expect this when he died; he expected blackness and nothingness. Watching his children grow and age brings tears to his eyes, but seeing his mate move onto another makes his heart ache. It’s frustrating, too, being only able to communicate with birds and dogs who chirp and bark at him and nothing more.

When his mate dies, he is not there with her. He only finds out after, when her funerary arrangements are being made and his children are inconsolable. It is in this time, most of all, that he wishes he was not a ghost. That he could touch and speak to his children, to comfort them and tell them that she would join him soon.

But she never does. He waits and waits and she does not show up. He wonders why, whether it is something he did or something she did. Did she simply not love him anymore? Maybe so, but that would not explain why he came here in the first place – he did not have someone pulling him to this place, so it couldn’t have been it.

He wonders if it is because he wasn’t there when he died. The tribe was there for him, when he met his doom – did she die alone? Was nobody else there? Was it his fault, for not being there?

He tries to solve it – is there when their healer dies, when their leader dies, when his sons and daughters die. But it doesn’t work. They stay for one moment, for one hopeful, earth-shattering moment, before they flicker like dust and disappear.

Being there does not help, it seems, but he keeps doing it. Perhaps one day, someone will stay, and he can comfort them then.

He discovers he is trapped not too long after. The land he’s forced to dwell in is large, objectively, but after years and years being trapped in one place it feels like the smallest thing ever. His tribe leaves and another takes their place, and he mourns the familiarity of their voices and their laughs. He grows attached to the new tribe – watching children being born, growing, coupling and dying does that to you – but they move on, too.

Everyone moves on.

There’s an invasion, he thinks. Or a revolution, maybe, but the people on his land don’t look happy about it. The buildings turn from simple to complex, from round to rigid, from wood to stone. They create crosses and altars and gather in one building for hours. _“Christianity”_ he hears it be called. He wonders what it means

A few hundred years later, the first person stays.

He’s young and he’s brave, and when he dies they rush to put an axe into his hands. When he comes to Robin, he looks disappointed.

Robin is ecstatic – _finally_ someone to talk to, _finally_ somehow who can understand what he’s going through. He expects the same confusion as him, the same curiosity and impatience to understand what’s going on.

The man is disappointed. He is disappointed and angry and betrayed, almost, and he ignores Robin’s attempts at communication to instead wander the land looking for something. “Valhalla,” he says, _“Valhalla, Valhalla, Valhalla,”_ in an increasingly distressed tone.

Robin does not know what this ‘Valhalla’ is, but he can guess. He wonders what kind of hell it is to grieve not only your family, but also your afterlife. He’s suddenly so glad he expected so little.

Because the man misses his family. That much is clear – he stares at a woman and a son all day, tracks their movement like it’s the only thing keeping him sane. He goes where they go until he cannot, until they walk out of the boundaries and into the sunset. The man fights back against the invisible walls but they still keep him there. Keep _them_ there, rather, because that’s when the man family gives up on his ‘Valhalla’ and turns his attention to Robin instead.

They don’t talk to each other. They can’t talk to each other, Robin’s grunts too innate and intuitive and the man’s words too foreign and strange. They point, however – they point and prod and laugh whenever a child trips or an animal scares itself.

The man shows off the axe in his hands and Robin shows him all the secrets of his land, the nooks and crannies the newcomers haven’t found yet because they don’t know the ground like he does. He has had thousands of years of trial and error, of course, but putting it like that sounds less impressive.

Robin learns his name the day before he moves on.

The past few days he’s been drawing with the handle of his axe in the mud, creating shapes and symbols despite not leaving a trace. The axe does nothing physically, but Robin can picture the shapes – _letters,_ he later learns – in his mind.

“Eivor,” the man says, pointing to the ground again. He points to himself, too. “Eivor.”

“Eivor,” Robin tries. And even though his noises are rough and scratchy, even if his pronunciation is off, Eivor looks so happy and delighted that he can’t help but share the sentiment.

The next day, an older man goes to Eivor’s grave. It takes Robin a while to recognise him, but Eivor remembers him instantly. His son stands at the grave for a long time, staring, before speaking for hours and hours.

He looks sad, as any mourner does, but he also looks proud. His eyes are alight with victory and his hands are covered in blood, and he places a broken and bloody axe on the grave before he leaves.

Eivor cries tears of joy. He disappears.

The next few centuries are much of the same.

Nobody stays long, and few people stay at all. Nobody ever stays longer than ten years, but Robin is glad to bring comfort and warmth to those confused and scared. He figures out what makes them move on – a resolution, a conclusion, an answer. For one woman it was to see her grandchildren be born. For another it was for someone to pass on a family recipe. A man in the twelfth century wouldn’t move on until his family found his tossed-aside body and dug him a proper grave.

He can’t think of why he’s here. He was happy in life, had no open-ended tragedies. He is not waiting for someone and no-one is waiting for him, so what is keeping him there?

In the late fourteenth century, disaster strikes. The people are sick and ill, and they do not get better. He relates to them in some ways, but his sickness was not nearly as cruel or as violent. A group of them are thrown into a pit and he doesn’t have to comfort them as much as he usually does – they died together, so they are not distressed. They have a sense of peace.

As he’s no longer focused on comforting them, they spend their time differently. He points and waves his hands, and they mumble and speak and he slowly learns to speak their language. _Me,_ they say and point to themselves. _You,_ they say and gesture at him. _Goodbye,_ they say the day someone comes to cover the pit they are buried in. He misses them and their words, but he moves on, as everything does.

A few centuries later, the burnings start.

They are slow at first, then fast, then _really_ fast. They accuse people of being ‘witches’, which Robin takes to be a bad thing, but their accusations have no logical evidence or reasoning. Instead, they seem to aim for the poor and the lonely, yelling at anyone they don’t like that they are witches and then burning them.

This is how he meets Mary.

At first, he does not realise she is special. He turns up at her burning like he does everyone else’s, growling and yelling at the audience despite it not making a difference, and Mary cries and cries and it burns his heart. She hurts and he hurts for her, and when she comes to him he holds her in his arms for as long as she needs.

It turns out she needs him for another two hundred years, because that’s how long she stays. Robin is confused and surprised – but more than anything he’s excited. He shows her everything he knows, everything he’s learned, and in turn she teaches him how to speak.

She asks his name and he tells her he doesn’t have one. She doesn’t ask anything else, but he wonders whether it’s time he gets one, too.

The next to stay is Humphrey. Humphrey is kind and funny, and he doesn’t like it when Robin pokes at the bottom of his head even though he doesn’t get how he’s supposed to resist when it’s _right there_ whenever his head falls off. He can’t just _not_ touch it – it’s impossible, really.

In the late 1700s, when the land has become less a village and more one, big house that clearly only prestigious people live in, a young girl dies and stays. She says her name is Kitty, and she’s “ever so excited to meet you, maybe we can have sleepovers and hangouts and become best friends!”

Robin likes Kitty, but he doesn’t think she will stay that long. She seems too happy and innocent to have something keeping her there. She’s the one who gives him his name, saying, “we can’t have you nameless! That’s so mean! Look, across the garden – that bird is a robin. We’ll call you Robin, too, because you have the same brown ruffled fur.”

The newly named Robin settles into his new role comfortably, and he’s happy when Kitty stays longer than ten years. They meet Thomas not too long after, and Kitty and Thomas cry onto each other for days upon days until Thomas is distracted from his grief long enough to meet the rest of them.

Thomas tries to teach him to read, insisting that letting someone live – or die – without reading the beautiful poetry out in the world is a mistake. Robin doesn’t care for it, though; it’s boring and complex and he much prefers Mary’s simple nursery rhymes to Thomas’ deep and meaningful novels.

As the years go by, his land changes more and more. It has changed so much since he was alive, but it had always been natural and earthy – now where there used to be grass is pavement and gravel, and the sight of tents and wooden huts is replaced by a large and elaborate ‘Button House.’ He doesn’t know how to feel about all these differences, but one unexpected happiness is the basement that gets installed, because it means he can talk to the group he met so long ago.

Less than a hundred years later comes Fanny. They all saw how she died and feel sorry for her, but her strict and formal attitude means nobody’s allowed to talk about it. If one of them tries to approach the topic, Fanny spins her head around and glares, and though Robin hates to admit it, he thinks he was never this frightened when he was out fighting wolves and bears.

A war comes along, and it surprises Robin. The more years passed, the more peaceful the world became, it seemed. He could not remember the last time there was a war on, and it had never taken over Button House the way it does now.

The building gets turned into what Fanny calls a ‘hospital’, a place for people to heal and get better and, if none of that is working, for them to die comfortable. Robin has never seen the place cleaner, and when the war ends he misses all the hustle and bustle.

He liked to scare people with his ‘powers’, making the flights flicker above people who had been annoying or rude to the nurses. Fanny disapproved of this, but Kitty always clapped her hands asked him to do it again, and how was he to refuse the girl? It was impossible.

The war ends and Robin is sad, but it turns out he shouldn’t have been because another war comes on soon after. And he means _really_ soon after. Living as long as he has, a hundred years to Robin feels like a breezy week, so another war starting a mere thirty years later feels as if he’s only just blinked and everything is chaotic again.

Button House isn’t a hospital this time – it’s a… well, he’s not really sure what it is. Neither is anyone else, but all they know is there’s soldiers in their home and they are all so serious all the time. Robin’s light flickering doesn’t do much to freak them out because they’re all so focused and fixated, and everything is so _boring._

The only entertainment they get in the form of the Captain and his constipated romance. Robin is not amused by the stuttering and second-meanings in their interactions, no matter how ‘adorable’ Kitty and Mary think it is. He laughs at the dancing they do around each other, Thomas writes poems about their great love, Fanny turns her eyes pointedly away, and Kitty and Mary keep singing about them being in a tree or something. He really doesn’t know.

The lieutenant leaves, the war ends, the Captain leaves, then returns, then dies. He is broken and fragile and they all work so hard to cheer him up, acting like his astute soldiers and following his every instruction until he gets too obnoxious and they have to take him down a peg.

Pat arrives sooner rather than later, and the visits from his family make Robin long for his own. It’s been such a long time that he’s forgotten their names and what they look like, but he will never forget his mate and children who held him so close as he died. He wonders where they are now, and if he will ever see them again. Then Pat calls for everyone to gather for Music Club this week, and he thinks he’s happy enough this with family, too.

Julian introduces him to chess. The others seem to dislike Julian a lot because of something called ‘politics’ which sounds far too confusing for Robin to ever learn, and he can’t deny that Julian acts like an arrogant idiot sometimes, but he’s also much more willing to answer his extensive questions and is more accepting of Robin’s violent nature than the others are.

By the time Lady Heather Button dies, the eight of them are so close they practically live in each other’s pockets. As they wait for the old woman to die, they bicker amongst themselves. Fanny glares at Julian’s trouserless legs, Kitty points out to Robin her favourite parts of her dress, Mary giggles as Thomas and Humphrey brag about who has the better clothes, and Pat hurriedly shushes at them to remain respectful and kind.

And when Heather Button dies without staying, the group groans and sighs in disappointment. Robin tells Julian to pay up for their bet, Pat yells with his high-pitched voice, and the Captain bagsies her room only to be chastised by Fanny all over again.

It’s chaotic, and it’s noisy, and Robin is really annoyed Julian for trying to trick him again. But he can’t help admitting that, all in all, well…

He’s glad he’s not alone anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Robin: *implies he slept with his sister*  
> Me: i do not see it, i am looking away.
> 
> Also, I know the show implied Robin was polyamorous but I kind of forgot about that until I was finished writing and then couldn't figure out a way to fit it in... Maybe in the future I'll write a little thing about Robin being in a throuple? I dunno, we'll see. Also, just so y'all know, I know nothing about the Palaeolithic Period and only know a bit more about the Viking Era (yes, Eivor the Viking in this was named after AC Valhalla's protagonist... I am attached to them and couldn't think of another name lol). My historical knowledge lies in the Anglo-Saxons, American West and Nazi Germany which I studied at GCSE, and now Tudor and post WW2 Germany which I'm studying at Sixthform. So, you know, take the things in this fic with a grain of salt lmao.
> 
> Once again, thank you so much for reading and I feel free to leave comments and kudos!


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